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The commander of Army Materiel Command, Gen. Ed Daly, spoke with more than 300 U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command employees, June 30, to inform them and ask for their buy-in on efforts to optimize supply chain operations.
Speaking to AMCOM Logistics Center employees in the Bob Jones Auditorium at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, Daly outlined the phases and timeline for implementing AMC’s Supply Chain Optimization effort and shared with the employees that the entire plans starts with them.
“The centerpiece, the cornerstone of every organization is its people and that’s you,” Daly said. “The reason I’m meeting with you today is I want to make sure you hear it from me personally.”
Supply Chain Optimization is AMC’s effort to better address supply chain challenges, reduce risk with vendors and invest in organic manufacturing to offset supply chain vulnerabilities. Today’s current global environment demands that we modernize the Army’s supply chain and make it more robust. Supply Chain Optimization will allow the Army to better adapt to supply chain disruptions and reduce vulnerabilities to support Army readiness.
“We know that change is constant and that it’s all about people and people equates to how well we train, we develop, we recruit and take care of you all,” Daly said. “It’s our obligation to think about the future with regard to this line of effort for the workforce. That’s why I wanted to personally talk to you about this specific effort on Supply Chain Optimization.”
Daly outlined how AMC developed its plan to shift supply chain operations from the Industrial Age to the 21st Century approach. Four years ago, to develop best practices, AMC started bringing in corporate leaders to look at how AMC performs depot maintenance, work loading and supply chain operations, as well as industry standards.
“We quickly realized that we need to change and adjust how we do business. We have to leverage technology a little bit more. We have to standardize processes, not just in AMCOM, but across all of Army Materiel Command and the Army at large,” Daly said.
Daly reviewed the five key tasks and the implementation timeline for the Supply Chain Optimization effort.
The key tasks are:
- Standardize supply chain processes and business rules across the LCMCs
- Standardize supply chain roles and organization across the LCMCs
- Provide Process and Functional training to the Workforce to execute new supply chain processes
- Establish HQ AMC governance and oversight of supply chain processes
- Set supply chain priorities at HQ AMC and cascade to LCMC portfolios
Daly also emphasized that AMC will ensure that AMCOM has all the training, tools, data analytics and capabilities to execute this effort. He further stated that it’s critical to standardize those processes across AMC, AMCOM, along with AMCOM’s sister commands, the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command and the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command.
“You should feel that you know your left and right limits and know exactly what we expect and what metrics we should go after,” he said. “But, time is our enemy. We need each and every one of you going forward to embrace this change. We need to standardize this across the board so we can leverage a couple of things: the processes, the effects, and the data and how we use, and how we apply predictive data analytics to what we’re trying to do.”
Daly reviewed the timeline for the effort, stating that the AMCOM commander would provide more information to the workforce, as well as feedback to AMC regarding the proposed timeline.
Timeline:
Aug. 19: Benchmark date to complete the future state design.
Oct. 31: Benchmark date to complete training and systems preparation.
March 31: Benchmark date for new organizations, processes and systems up and running.
“This is important because of ongoing supply chain vulnerabilities. We are also under a downward constraint in our budget,” he said. “That’s going to continue. Whether we’re talking about strategic depth, supply availability numbers or non-mission capable rates, our buying power is going down.
“We can’t do this unless we all buy into it. My commitment to you is we are going to walk through this and do it right and deliberate, but we’re going to do it with tempo. We are going to listen to you as we progress, because you’re the experts. We will not be dismissive of what your concerns are.”
Daly said he’s talked to several companies’ chief executive officers who have done optimized their supply operations and seen exponential increases in the performance of the organizations. With that in mind, Daly outlined the end-state goals for the effort:
End state:
- HQ AMC providing strategic priorities and oversight to synchronize supply chain operations;
- Functionally aligned supply chain roles executing standardized processes across the life-cycle logistics commands;
- Data-driven decision-making underpinning supply-chain planning and execution; and
- AMC executing mission command of a highly responsive and highly resilient Army supply chain.
Daly reiterated how much the success of the supply optimization effort depends on gaining the support and buy-in of the AMCOM workforce.
“The more mature we get, the more we realize that change is constant,” Daly said. In closing, Daly emphasized the need to standardize position descriptions and processes to make this effort successful.
“We are setting the conditions for the future and there’s a lot of goodness in that,” he said.
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